Dividends

Sorcerer2018

Linton said:

ANGLICANPAT said:

Investment trusts  are they any different  for the liklihood of  dividends being in any form other than cash ?

No.

technically incorrect, some investment trusts pay out scrip dividends (shares) as well as cash dividends, but typically you can't access them from your provider.  If you owned the shares directly (i.e not via your platform provider), it would be possible for you to nominate the script dividends instead of cash, because you would be the legal owner of the shares.

wmb194

LHW99 said:

If you hold shares directly (used to be with an actual share certificate, but probably now on the share register under your own name) you can / could sometimes choose to have the company issue you with extra shares, purchased using part or all of the cash dividend. AFAIK if you hold shares through a platform, none of them would offer that, as the shares are not individually registered to you personally, just that your bit of the platform's block of that share is recorded as your property.

Iweb may just be trying to make this clear.

No, this is incorrect. Scrip dividends - let's use the correct terminology - are, whilst less fashionable than they used to be, not uncommon and whilst I haven't tried it with iWeb I've never had a problem with them being added/lodged ("paid") to a broker's nominee account with any fraction of a share sold in the market and the money credited to my account*. If what we're discussing is correct, I assume that if iWeb refuses to add them but receives them anyway it'll just sell them in the market and credit the proceeds to your account. It must have recently faced this issue when e.g., Bloomsbury paid its entire dividend as a scrip dividend.

I'm really surprised this is an issue as I recently used PrimaryBid to subscribe to an open offer of shares and they were added to my iWeb account without any fuss. If it will do it for this then why not for scrip dividends?

*Some brokers e.g., Trading212 allow fractions so I presume not all will do this.